Yeah, for me, picking an option and it not doing what I expected breaks immersion way more than being told what it does.
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I wish, dearly, that official CoGs could find some way to properly implement a save system already. It’s become such a slog for me to try and read any new releases anymore, because I know that one screw-up and I’ve gotta go ALL THE WAY BACK and start over.
And if the story is 100,000+ words? Oh lordy.
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I feel this too. I like Choice of Robots a lot because it just tells you how much of a certain stat you need for important choices, so I feel less of my customary urge to dive into the code and calculate an optimal path.
Another one of my favourites is The Saga of Oedipus Rex. No numerical stats to check at all aside from money—very relaxing. Not that I don’t enjoy trawling through the code, but it can get tedious.
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I honestly don’t find those options immersion breaking but it might be because I’ve played RPGs since the day I learned to read and read WAY too many manga and manwhas with ‘RPG mechanics are real and are basically laws of physics’ elements so I’m used to stats just being a thing at all time.
But even if it did break my immersion a little, it’s a lot less immersion breaking than forcing me to restart because I picked the wrong choice or I just insulted a character I like / ruined my stats (nothing like going from a 70% on a stat in Samurai of Hyuga to like 50 right before a big moment because the choice you just made gave a big boost to the opposite stat for some obscure reason)
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Sometimes this is actually a coding error. Even in some published games. Like there’s one option in AWPW that increases your dominance stat even though it’s an option to be submissive. It’s an opposed pair stat, and it was meant to be -dominance and not +dominance.
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Interesting, I always just assumed me and the author had a very different view of stuff like how a ‘drifer choice’ sounds like. That would it’s own kind of problem too I guess.
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Yeah, Witchcraft U, on day one of its publish, had a lot of coding gaffes that needed to be patched up after the fact. There was another WIP for a CoG in progress where I saw a few coding whoopsies, too, and I think(?) I pointed those out to the author - or somebody did, I don’t quite remember - and they were all, “Crap, thanks, I didn’t even realize I did that.”
Sometimes all the editing and beta reading in the world can’t quite catch every detail, what can you do but roll with it, right?
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Oh, huh. I played (the demo of) Witchcraft U the day it was published and thought it was an incredibly strange game where choices didn’t seem to matter much. Maybe it was just coding errors.
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This was fixed, wasn’t it?
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Oh no, even the official thread for it has people saying that it felt like their choices didn’t mean much of anything. It’s just that some of the issues were coding gaffes. But overall, Witchcraft U was a pretty troubled game, all around.
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If it was, it was pretty recent. I haven’t played it in a few weeks, but it was still there last time I played. (I have played AWPW many times.)
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That remind me of something else I don’t like: Pointlessly unappealing or low effort covers for the games. I didn’t even bother trying Witchcraft U because the cover screamed ‘We didn’t even pretend to try’.
CCH 2.5 had that problem on release but quickly got a MUCH better cover.
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The cover art for Witchcraft U is part of what annoyed me to the point of making my post in the “tropes you hate” thread about how I wish we could do any other kind of magical school story than the bog-standard Harry Potter wannabe that is bloating the genre. It looks like a bunch of college kids cramming for some magical exam, which made me think, “oh, hey, a magic school story about actually attending magic school for once, that might be neat.”
Nope. Harry Potter wannabe with flavors of mafia business and small business drama.
I was very annoyed.
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Oh. It’s not about attending the school? Maybe that’s why I didn’t like it. I totally still thought it was by the time the demo ended.
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I think Hosted Games can be forgiven for unappealing art. If you don’t happen to also be a good artist, you have to commission it yourself, and for some authors that’s understandably on a small budget, or none at all.
Frankly, even Choice of Games can be forgiven. Sometimes even a relatively costly commissioned piece just doesn’t mesh with some peoples’ preferences. It’s not like any of us are here for the amazing graphics.
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To be fair, Harry Potter wannabe are bloated IN BOOKS, because I swear to god, it’s almost impossible to find games with that concept.
And all those I could find were deader than dead or early ‘in-developement’.
Though COGs technically are novels too I guess.
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Nah, the school part is very inconsequential in the scheme of things, your bigger plot concerns are:
1. Investigating your adoptive family (of mobsters) for connection to illegal relic proliferation (relics are made from the corpses of Hallows, so it’s basically organ harvesting)
2. Getting involved in a large-scale mind-altering scheme to purposely keep mundane humans in the dark about magic, which the Trine (a.k.a. magical Illuminati) are responsible for perpetrating, and by the way, they want to recruit you
3. Discovering that the boss of your day job is mixing magical drugs into her product to keep customers happy, meanwhile, her competitors actively use magic to scare or harm people in an effort to drive business away
4. Also something about demonic possessions, I guess?
Not featured: Anything to do with magical studies.
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I can forgive it but I still won’t like it. Just like for the ‘unclear choice’ thing, I don’t like it but I still love Samurai of Hyuga.
Also small business drama is the last thing I’d care about in a game about a magic school.
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Likewise. I blew the whistle on them both to the magical police and wound up getting myself fired, but it was worth it.
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Isn’t getting fired for reporting illegal stuff against labour laws or does the magic world just not care?
Also that remind me of something I hate: Bait and switch stories. No, if I buy a game about superheroes, I do not want to play your weird reality TV show. No, I don’t care if it’s totally super important for your big twist and how my character would totally do that.
If I buy a game about dragons, I don’t want the dragons to barely appear and more or less be unimportant to the story.
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